Amid the sweeping changes and exciting new content listed in Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail’s preliminary patch notes, there’s a game-changing upgrade hidden under the Housing and Miscellaneous notes: The infamously ineffective Blacklist function will finally serve as more than a glorified mute button in Patch 7.0.
Currently, Blacklisting a player in FFXIV omits their messages in chat and prevents them from sending you private Tells, Trade requests, or party invites, and nothing more. It does nothing to stop that player from queueing into the same duties as you, joining a Party Finder group that you’re in but not hosting, or even entering your private player housing.
According to the 7.0 preliminary patch notes, multiple changes will be implemented to make Blacklisting more effective at mitigating malicious behavior.
The most notable upgrade is the Estate Holder Rights system, a new player housing feature that will allow you to bar certain players from your private residence.
Essentially, when the primary “rightsholder” of an estate—either the owner of a private house or the master of the Free Company who owns the house—is present on the housing plot, all characters on their blacklist will be barred from stepping foot on your estate grounds. Rightsholders can also manually eject and bar characters not on their blacklist by selecting the player and selecting “Bar from Property” in the submenu.
Additionally, primary rightsholders of FC estates and private houses can appoint secondary rightsholders who will also have the authority to eject and bar characters. FC estates can have up to four secondary rightsholders, while private houses can have up to three. Whether or not the blacklists of the secondary rightsholders will be barred from the estate can be customized via the “Estate Holder Rights” menu.
Players will also be able to access a new blacklist menu from under the Social tab of the main menu. The revamped menu will allow you to save comments for each character, making it easier to keep track of when and why you blocked the offending player. Starting in Dawntrail, a blacklist will apply to every other character registered to that player’s account—however, this unfortunately won’t be retroactive, so all characters blacklisted before 7.0 will have to be re-blocked to enable this feature.
There will also be major changes to the way that messages from blocked players are filtered in chat—but it seems like there’s still nothing preventing you from randomly queueing into duties and roulettes with blacklisted characters. Still, the Estate Holder Rights system and account-wide blocking will be a huge help in mitigating deliberate and targeted harassment going forward.
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail goes live in early access on June 28.
